Step 7: Make things!

Step 8: Useful links

Recycle with wormsRecycle WikiU.S. Department of Energy Home tipsMore to be added soon.

Step 2: Don't pour your money down the drain!

When performing our daily hygiene routine, such as brushing teeth, washing face/hands, showering, we use up A LOT of water.

Here are somethings I do to help save water and lower those bills!

When brushing your teeth, turn off that water when your not using it! I like to really brush for 2-3 minutes, if I were to leave the water on during this time, I am easily dumping 3+ gallons down the drain.

I love taking long showers, if you do too, buy yourself a water and energy saving shower head. these things make your showering experience efficient by restricting the amount of water used to about 2.5 gallons per minute.

When doing my dishes, I rinse down the dirty dishes and place them outside the sink, then I start soaping them up and start stacking them inside the sink again, with the water OFF. When I am either done with them all, or the sink fills up, I turn the water back on and rinse and put them to dry. Some of us leave the water running the whole time, that is money you are pouring down the drain!

Laundry is a big thing too, I wait till I know that I will fill up the whole washer with dirty clothes, bringing down the amount of loads that I will ultimately have to do.

Drying your clothes. If you have a yard, put up a clothes line! Let the wind and sun dry the clothes for you. a dryer sucks up a bunch of electricity.

These things add up, and in short time you will notice you will start saving money, helping out the environment and feeling good about yourself at the same time!

I can't hang my clothes outside to dry (allergens like pollens are not my friends!), but I do dry them inside. In winter especially, I'll distribute clothes from the washer in the three bedrooms and we do without a separate humidifier.

Since I've started standing on one foot while brushing my teeth to help improve the stability of my ankles, I've also stopped leaving the water running while I do them. Works for me. Also, things that I know other people do include using their bath water to water the garden (carrying all those buckets downstairs FTW) and also leaving a bucket in the shower with them to save water (what they use this for I'm not sure)

Where I work, I've been paying attention and EVERYONE...ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE lets the water run the whole time they're washing their hands, which is about 30 seconds. Also while brushing their teeth. And they use about 6 pumps of liquid soap out of the dispenser; I've found 1 is plenty. Then they take between 2 and FIVE paper towels from the dispenser, again, 1 is sufficient. My hands are still a bit damp with 1, but they're still dry before I get back to my desk 30 seconds later. I won't mention that we have 80,000 watts of lights just on our floor of this building, and they're often left on 24 hours a day even when nobody is here.